Ludwig Van Beethoven: Overture, Egmont

Beethoven is the defining figure of the romantic artist. He was the first major composer who was not a servant, either of an aristocrat, or of the Church. The idea of the artist as hero, of the work of art being a triumph of the human will over adversity (and Beethoven had his fair share), was an utterly Beethovenian one. He pushed this idea beyond art and onto the world stage, in the fight against tyranny and for human freedom. The two Beethoven pieces in this concert are firmly in this heroic mould.

Beethoven's overture to Goethe's play about Count Egmont's unsuccessful attempts to free the Netherlands from Spanish oppression carries this message of freedom so powerfully that it was adopted as the unofficial musical symbol of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union.

The overture begins in dark vein, as F minor string chords punch out an oppressively heavy rhythm, countered by plaintive cries of pain in the winds. These musical motives battle it out in a stormy central section until, ultimately light and right triumph.

Benjamin Britten: Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

Benjamin Britten was much less concerned with the idea of the artist as hero as he was with the desire for his music to be useful. The commission to write a piece of music for a film that introduced the instruments of the orchestra to an audience of children might have been, in other hands, a dry and worthy exercise, but Britten's turned out an exuberant masterpiece in his Young Person's Guide. The first good choice he made was to structure the piece as a set of variations on a majestic, minor key theme by Henry Purcell, taken from Purcell's incidental music to Aphra Behn's play The Moor's Revenge. After introducing the theme, Britten's variations one by one, show off what the orchestral sections can do, starting from the highest woodwinds, going down through strings and brass and ending with a great dance for the percussion section. Then, in the climactic masterstroke, he brings all the instrumental groups back, one by one, in a scurrying fugue (fugue meaning a musical game of chase). The moment when the big Purcell theme comes blazing back in the brass with all of the other instruments still skirling around it might just be the most ecstatically joyful moment in all music.25-minute interval

The Eroica is in four movements, following the classic Beethovenian journey from darkness into light. The first is a tour de force of emotional narrative, of contrasts and extremes, with violent mood swings, in which the opening rocking melody is quickly transformed into music which is more dark, dramatic and defiant. Beethoven allows the dark side to triumph in the second movement, a funeral march which seems to pre-shadow Mahler, and which treads an inexorable, minor key path towards a terrifying, loud climax before retreating back to a heartbreakingly fractured version of the original march. A demonic, fast dance (scherzo) breaks the mood in the third movement before giving way to the extraordinary finale. A tentative, plucked rhythm on the strings creeps in. The music builds up line by line, growing in confidence until the full orchestra blazes in with a broad, triumphant melody which Beethoven then uses as the basis of a set of exuberant variations.